Comprehensive spending review: the 10 things you need to know

The Comprehensive Spending Review is finally published today. Beneath the mountain of unimaginable numbers are some key facts you need to understand to help comprehend exactly what George Osborne has in store

This is George Osborne's balance sheet - and shows exactly what is spent by who in Britain today. The data gives us a picture of enormous spending on health and benefits and shows which departments are going up and which are going down.

How big is Britain's debt? The latest data from the Office for National Statistics showed Britain's public finances posted a record August deficit after inflation pushed up debt interest payments. The deficit (or the gap between what the government has coming in and what it spends) for 2009/10 is: £106.369bn excluding financial interventions or £100.367bn including financial interventions.

Right on arrival, the government scrapped or suspended projects worth £10.5bn. Of the projects, £2bn have been cut and £8.5bn suspended. Find out what they are and who they hit worst. This includes further projects scrapped - check out the spreadsheet for more details.

The hand of chancellor George Osborne carrying the famous old ministerial red box as he leaves 11 Downing Street to deliver his emergency budget earlier this year. Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA

Chancellor George Osborne set out detailed measures in his first budget - the so-called 'emergency budget'. Behind these measures were a detailed set of calculations - how much will come in and go out each year. So, a tax cut costs the government money, a spending cut brings cash in. Interestingly, these measures are in addition to the ones already planned by Labour - which makes a total of £113bn being taken out of the economy by 2014-15.

Many borrowers are staying on their old mortgage and overpaying rather than remortgaging at a higher rate. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

While threatened cuts to child benefit is making headlines, proposed changes to housing benefit could have a huge impact across the country. Crisis, the charity for single homeless people, has warned that £1.8bn of housing benefit cuts proposed by the government in the last Budget could lead to a worsening of debt problems and homelessness. Figures released by the Department for Work and Pensions as part of an impact assessment of the cuts to Local Housing Allowance (LHA) show the local authorities likely to be worst hit by the cuts.

The global recession and credit crunch has hit the most-developed economies hard - even though the OECD is now talking up their prospects. As George Osborne bases the billions of cuts around getting our deficit down, we have extracted the key data from the OECD. We wanted to show how our budget deficit and national debt compare to equivalent economies.

Inflation is supposed to be going down again. But more expensive air fares, rising food bills and price mark-ups on clothes after the summer sales kept Britain's inflation rate stubbornly high at 3.1% last month. The figures, released today by the Office for National Statistics, confounded City expectations that the cost of living as measured by the consumer prices index would fall back towards the government's 2% target. Osborne uses Treasury inflation forecasts to predict how spending will change in real terms in 2014-15.

The number of people claiming jobless benefits in Britain last month is rising at its fastest rate since January. However, the wider measure of unemployment, which also includes people out of work who are not eligible for benefits or choose not to claim, dipped in the three months to August thanks to 16 and 17-year-olds finding work or training. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) says the number of people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance climbed by 5,300 last month, slightly above City forecasts, to 1.47 million. That is the biggest rise since January and comes after August's increase was revised higher to 3,800. Will the cuts make these figures worse?

Public sector employment across Britain. Click image for graphic. Illustration: Jenny Ridley for the Guardian

Much of the recent rise in unemployment statistics has been countered by rising employment in the public sector. According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, 21.1% of the population now works in the public sector - up from around 19% a couple of years ago. Much of the rise is due to nationalising the banks - although there have been healthy increases in health and education too. In fact, of the 6m, 1.6m work for the NHS. Ironically, it was higher under the previous Conservative government - in 1992 the figure was 23.1%. But since then privatisations took their toll. What will the Liberal-Conservative coalition do?

Whatever George Osborne announces will only make sense in terms of GDP. ONS data revealed that the negative growth experienced in 2008-09 was the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s, with a decline in GDP of 6.4% rather than 6.2%. See how it's changed.